Page 144 of Where the Snakes Sleep

Camille stops reading after that one and leaves the room for around twenty minutes.

When he returns, his face has been washed, and his hair is wet around the temples.

I don’t mention it.

We continue.

By sunrise, neither of us has slept, and the whole thing has stopped feeling like discovery and started feeling like digging out a grave, one handful of dirt at a time.

The evidence doesn’t tell us where the bodies are buried. It doesn’t name the exact moment each person vanished from the earth. What it does is colder.

Henri knew when people were about to vanish—the records would shift in tone days before, permissions would be revoked, access logs would be wiped clean. He manipulated timelines, backdated memos, planted whispers about marital problems and unstable behavior. He deliberately redirected suspicion toward Alain Moreau’s quiet grief, and the documents prove it.

My throat feels dry. “I want copies out today.”

Camille looks at me from across the study, the lamplight catching the exhaustion in his bloodshot eyes. “So do I.”

By noon, encrypted copies exist on three separate drives, sent to Alberte’s estate lawyer in the neighboring city, an attorney Camille trusts professionally but has never involved in the investigation before, which makes me feel marginally better about using him, and a journalist.

That one scares me most.

Camille knows her work, though. She has covered scientific misconduct, trafficking, and institutional corruption before, and he thinks she will understand what she is looking at without immediately publishing something reckless.

I still make him show me everything he writes, which he does. Then I rewrite half of it because his email sounds like it was dictated by a nineteenth-century diplomat preparing to declare war.

He looks personally wounded. “You removed the context.”

“No, I removed six paragraphs explaining the history of Le Mas before she’s even opened the attachments.”

“The history is relevant.”

“She can read the documents.”

“She requires framing.”

“She’ll require cocaine after reading your email.”

Ryan, one.

French academia, zero.

A final copy has been prepared for the police but has not yet been transmitted.

I’m not quite ready for that one yet.

By one thirty, we are finished.

Not finished-finished.

Nothing about this feels like it will ever be finished.

But at least the evidence no longer feels like something I have to physically guard.

The next day is relatively normal.

I sleep until noon because apparently staying awake for basically an entire day to solve a murder conspiracy does not pair well with healthy circadian rhythms, and when I eventually wander downstairs, Camille is in the kitchen making coffee.

He looks at me. I look at him.